April 21, 2018

Lula Falls, and Brazilian Democracy Looks Shakier

We live
in a world where it is no longer shocking to learn that major heads of
state—Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Rodrigo Duterte, Benjamin
Netanyahu—are under suspicion for having misused the power of their
office, although none of these has yet been formally charged with any
wrongdoing. In Latin America, on the other hand, a slew of sitting and
former Presidents have been swept up in corruption scandals, a number
have been investigated and indicted, and several have gone to jail. Last
month, in Peru, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski resigned
rather than face impeachment over corruption allegations, and his
predecessor, Ollanta Humala, is in jail awaiting trial for alleged
corruption. Ricardo Martinelli, the former President of Panama, has been
in jail in Miami since June, pending extradition on corruption charges.
El Salvador’s former President Antonio Saca is in prison on charges of
embezzling public funds, while his predecessor, Francisco Flores, died,
of a cerebral hemorrhage, while under house arrest pending his trial.
(Flores was accused of having diverted, to his own pocket, several
million dollars in foreign aid intended for earthquake victims.) In
neighboring Guatemala, two former Presidents, Álvaro Colom and Otto
Pérez Molina, are also facing trial, also for corruption. Others,
accused of a variety of crimes, mostly bribery or embezzlement of public
funds, are fighting in the courts, while a couple—Alejandro Toledo, of
Peru, and Mauricio Funes, of El Salvador—have become fugitives, living
in the United States and Nicaragua, respectively.

Latin
America’s politicians, in other words, are not scoring very well in the
honesty game, but perhaps it can at least be said that the justice
system is prevailing in their countries. Or is it? In some instances,
the evidence for the alleged corruption is clear, but in some it is not,
as in the case of Kuczynski, where there was no clear proof of guilt
but he was forced to resign after his political enemies launched a
concerted campaign against him. There is a similar sense of a political
vendetta at work in the case of the former Brazilian President Luiz
Inácio Lula da Silva. On Saturday, amid high drama and widespread
protests by his supporters, Lula, as he is known, who is seventy-two,
turned himself in to begin serving a twelve-year prison sentence on
corruption charges, after the Supreme Court denied his appeal for a writ
of habeas corpus. Lula, who led Brazil from 2003 to 2011, as the head
of the left-wing Workers’ Party, which he founded, is not only one of
the most charismatic public figures in Latin America but is still the
most popular politician in Brazil. He was planning to run for the
Presidency again, and, according to the polls, if elections were held
tomorrow, he would win by a wide margin. But the elections are scheduled
for October, and, with his imprisonment, Lula is, most likely, out of
the running.

On Saturday, after a daylong standoff
at a steelworkers-union building in São Paulo, Lula told his
supporters, “I will comply with the order, and all of you will become
Lula. I’m not above the law. If I didn’t believe in the law, I wouldn’t
have started a political party. I would have started a revolution.” He
joked that he had been “born with a short neck so that I can keep my
head high.” Then he agreed to surrender to the authorities.

Lula
has denied any culpability in the case he has been sentenced for, a
tangled affair involving a seaside apartment that he is said to have
intended to buy at a favorable price from a developer. There are other
cases pending, including one involving improvements to a ranch where
Lula sometimes stays. His arrest has made him the latest and
highest-profile figure to fall in Brazil’s all-singing, all-dancing
corruption investigation, called Operação Lava Jato, or Operation Car
Wash. For the past several years, the crusading judge Sérgio Moro—who
also ordered Lula’s surrender—and a team of investigators and
prosecutors have overseen Operação Lava Jato from the southern city of
Curitiba. Hundreds of people have been arrested for their alleged
involvement in bribery schemes operated out of the state-owned oil
company, Petrobras, by executives of the construction giant Odebrecht,
and at several other major Brazilian firms. Some of the former Latin
American Presidents who are currently in jail, including Panama’s
Martinelli, were fingered by Odebrecht officials for taking bribes in
exchange for lucrative contracts.

Whatever the
truth of the charges against him, Lula deserves credit for having
transformed the economy of his vast, unequal country, lifting as many as
forty million Brazilians out of dire poverty. Many of his loyalists
believe that a vendetta against him began in earnest in 2016, when the
National Congress, controlled by right-wing opponents of the Workers’
Party, impeached his protégée and successor in office, President Dilma
Rousseff. The impeachment of Dilma, as she is known, came after massive
public protests were staged against her government, in the wake of the
Lava Jato revelations about the Petrobras corruption, in which several
senior government officials were implicated. Dilma, however, was not
accused of personal corruption. Her impeachment, as I wrote at the time,
was initiated for much more abstract transgressions, consisting of
“doctoring official budget figures and using money from state banks in
order to hide the real state of Brazil’s shrinking economy, so as to
help her win reëlection, in 2014.” In one of the episode’s
many bitter ironies, Eduardo Cunha, the president of the Chamber of
Deputies and the leader of the impeachment campaign, was himself found
guilty of taking more than a million dollars from Petrobras. Last year,
he was sentenced to fifteen years in prison.

It
also emerged that Michel Temer, Dilma’s former Vice-President, a
right-of-center coalition partner who replaced her in office, had
conspired against her with members of Congress. Two years on, there is
no doubt that Brazil’s government has veered sharply to the right, with
Temer’s government seeking to push through bills to reduce protections
for Brazil’s indigenous peoples and wilderness areas, to pave the way
for new mines and other extractive industries.
Temer,
too, has been implicated in corruption schemes, and last year he was
formally charged with receiving five million dollars in bribes. His
popularity is said to be at around seven per cent—the lowest for a
Brazilian President in three decades. But Temer remains in office, for
the simple but powerful reason that his allies control a majority of
seats in Congress, where they have already thwarted several attempts to
impeach him and to have him tried by the Supreme Court—as Lula was this
past week. Meanwhile, more than half of Brazil’s legislators are under
some sort of investigation.

There
seems little doubt that Brazil will be a more divided place after this
week. It is certainly a very different nation from what it was when Lula
was hailed as the leader of one of the world’s emerging economic
powers—known as BRICs (Brazil,
Russia, India, and China)—seemingly ready to take its place on the world
stage. Many Brazilians recall with pride the moment, in 2009, when
Barack Obama, recently sworn in as President, shook Lula’s hand and
said, “This is my man, right here. I love this guy.”

But,
then, it is a very different world from what it was then. Brazil was
the powerhouse in a Latin America that was at the height of the
so-called Pink Tide of leftist governments. With Hugo Chávez in
Venezuela, Néstor Kirchner in Argentina, Pepe Mujica in Uruguay, Rafael
Correa in Ecuador, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua,
and Michelle Bachelet in Chile, there was a sense that the region’s
leftists had, for better or worse, turned some kind of corner. They were
a mixed bag, but, with Lula, a pragmatist, at the helm in Brazil, there
was a sense of promise that somehow socialism and capitalism could find
functional synergies, and coexist in the region. Today, most of the
Pink Tide’s original leaders are either dead or out of power, and, with
only a couple of exceptions—including Venezuela, which, under Chávez’s
successor, Nicolás Maduro, is in complete meltdown—the region is now in the hands of political conservatives.

Much
of Lula’s social achievement may now be at risk. In an echo of what is
taking place in the United States, Brazil is a country that is polarized
between its liberals and its conservatives, and the latter have shown
themselves to be determined, in as many ways as possible, to roll back
the reforms that Lula and Dilma instituted. It is worth noting that,
after Lula, one of the most popular politicians in the country, and a
candidate in the upcoming Presidential elections, is Congressman Jair
Bolsonaro, a right-wing former Army parachutist, who is a champion of
the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985. When
Bolsonaro cast his vote against Dilma in the impeachment proceedings, he
did so in the name of an officer who was responsible for the unit that
had tortured her after arresting her when, as a young woman, she was a
member of an underground leftist group.

In other
changes, a conservative televangelist, Marcelo Crivella—who is, among
other things, a creationist and homophobe—is now the mayor of
freewheeling Rio de Janeiro. Earlier this year, in an agreement with
Temer, he decided to tackle the city’s gang problem by deploying the
military in the favelas. The most notable incident of the crackdown so
far, however, has been the targeted shooting of Marielle Franco, a
thirty-eight-year-old city councillor. A socialist and feminist, the
outspoken Franco was a vocal critic of the military intervention as well
as of extrajudicial killings carried out by police in the city’s
favelas.

Brazil’s military has recently begun to
make its presence felt in others ways. A few days before the Supreme
Court issued its final verdict against Lula, the commander of the Army
issued blustering public statements about how it was necessary for “an
end to impunity,” making it clear that he wanted to see Lula in jail.
Then, on Saturday night, as federal police prepared to fly Lula to
Curitiba, where he was to begin serving his sentence, voices on the
military’s radio frequency were recorded telling the pilots to “throw
that garbage out the window.” In such ways—and with Lula in jail and
Temer in the Presidency—it doesn’t feel as if anything close to justice
has been done in Brazil, and that the battle lines are being drawn for
confrontations to come.